Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“American consumers and businesses bore roughly 93 percent of the cost of Trump’s tariffs, according to one analysis by Moody’s. The U.S. Trade Commission concluded in 2023 that American companies and consumers “bore nearly the full cost” of the tariffs Trump levied on steel, aluminum, and many goods imported from China.”
https://reason.com/2024/12/04/peter-navarro-should-not-have-power-over-u-s-trade-policy-or-anything/
Trade and new efficient technology work in similar ways. They both directly and noticeably eliminate certain jobs, but, produce more economic growth and jobs total.
https://youtu.be/TWs-B6soIYg?si=wCMkmSawRqBcqund
“India and Pakistan are losing ground to a common deadly enemy. Vast clouds of dense, toxic smog have once again shrouded metropolises in South Asia. Air pollution regularly spikes in November in the subcontinent, but this year’s dirty air has still been breathtaking in its scale and severity. The gray, smoky pollution is even visible to satellites, and it’s fueling a public health crisis.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/387135/india-pakistan-air-pollution-delhi-lahore-aqi
Elon Musk Already Flexing His Power Over Republicans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iu6K6-2HMg
Support for rightwing parties in the U.S. and Europe is more driven by culture than economics. Personal finances isn’t a big predictor of such support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1L1qtNqFG4
“A suspect who was “hell-bent” on killing as many people as possible drove a rented pickup truck around barricades and plowed his vehicle through a crowd of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans at a high rate of speed, leaving at least 15 dead and injuring dozens of others early Wednesday, city and federal officials said.
After mowing down numerous people over a three-block stretch on the famed thoroughfare while firing shots into the crowd, the suspect — identified by sources as Shamsud Din Jabbar, 42 — allegedly got out of the truck wielding an assault rifle and opened fire on police officers, law enforcement officials briefed on the incident told ABC News. The FBI does not “believe Jabbar was solely responsible” for the incident, which is being investigated as an act of terror.
Officers returned fire, killing Jabbar, a U.S. citizen from Texas, sources said. At least two police officers were shot and wounded, authorities said.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/orleans-attack-updates-10-dead-171833279.html
How America broke the turkey
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/11/22/23970874/thanksgiving-turkey-farming-jennie-o-hormel-white-house-pardon
“Measles, mumps, and polio are supposed to be diseases of the past. In the early to mid-20th century, scientists developed vaccines that effectively eliminated the risk of anyone getting sick or dying from illnesses that had killed millions over millennia of human history.
Vaccines, alongside sanitized water and antibiotics, have marked the epoch of modern medicine. The US was at the cutting edge of eliminating these diseases, which helped propel life expectancy and economic growth in the postwar era.”
…
“As long-accepted, lifesaving public health measures increasingly become politically polarized, routine vaccination rates are rapidly declining in much of the US. In the 2019–2020 school year, three states had less than 90 percent of K–12 students vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella. By the 2023–2024 school year, 14 states had fallen below that threshold. The number of states with more than 95 percent of schoolchildren vaccinated — the preferred level of coverage to prevent outbreaks — dropped from 20 to 11 during that same period.
It is no surprise then that the number of US measles cases more than quadrupled from 2023 to 2024. Nobody has died of measles in the US since 2015, but if vaccination rates continue to decline, this highly contagious disease (one person can infect more than a dozen other people) will spread with increasing ease, which raises the risk that American kids could die.
We know how to prevent that. We’ve had remarkably safe, effective shots for decades. We just need to keep using them.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/386215/trump-rfk-jr-vaccines-health-measles-chart
“Political polarization shapes how people interpret risk and who they trust and listen to, which shapes what health services they access and what behaviors they partake in or don’t. This dynamic was a big reason Covid death rates so dramatically diverged between Republicans and Democrats: Party affiliation determined people’s willingness to get vaccinated, wear masks, social distance, and take other preventive measures, says Oberlander. Republicans were less likely to take these measures, and more likely to die of Covid as a consequence.”
…
“Although left-wing Americans were more likely to take Covid’s risks seriously, Van Bavel notes Republicans outpaced Democrats on Ebola fears throughout the 2014 outbreak, during Barack Obama’s presidency. “It’s not that Democrats in America have a unique capacity to be attuned to the science and the risks of epidemics and pandemics,” he says; it’s that polarized people on the left and the right distrust the other party’s ability to handle any health threat.
Polarization is also creeping into our relationships with health care providers. A recent survey by communications firm Edelman found people feared the politicization of medical science as much as they feared the cost of medical care; 41 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they wouldn’t trust medical advice from a provider who had a different political persuasion than they did, or would stop seeing them entirely.”
https://www.vox.com/even-better/388130/polarization-political-partisan-health-rfk-jr
“We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys — factory farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds that have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we will do it all even though turkey meat is widely considered flavorless and unpalatable.
“It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché — a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past.”
So what is essentially the national holiday of meat-eating revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. That fact clashes with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to ditch meat, or even to eat less of it: the taste, stupid.
Undoubtedly, that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is a lot more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why.”
…
“Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings — a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols.
Besides, we don’t even like turkey.”
…
“In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the new book Consider the Turkey, said on a recent episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food… They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds.
From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.”
On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of about 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to an estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the third Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/388106/thanksgiving-turkey-food-waste-sides-dry-bland